Notice from Time.ly

For one, I appreciate knowing that. However, your comment sort of begs the question ‘Why not’?

Hello,

We have done this for several reasons:
1. Our high level of support for a free product was unsustainable. We will continue to offer Premium Support to our Pro Users.

2. Our previous knowledge base was difficult to search and almost impossible to browse. We hope that by putting it all on our site, with robust search and easy browsability, users of the calendar will be able to find the information they need.

3. Our new Community Forum will be a place for users to help each other out. We think that the incredible knowledge and skills of our userbase deserves it’s own site ??

All the best,
The Timely Team

Taking what you say at face value, it looks to me that this forum equates a group of blind and minimally sighted people trying to find a door in a blacked out room.

Having said that, let me say that I am a Pro user and think this is a great product. Does it have limits? Yes. Does it work with all the hundreds (thousands, maybe) of themes that users use? Obviously not, but what it does, it does exceedingly well.

I did not know about your free community forum. I would humbly suggest that you publicize it so that more users leave this site and migrate to the ‘community’.

Hi Dave,

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Our new Community Forum is being officially launched today ??
We will be posting on our Facebook, Twitter, and on our Blog to let our users know about our new support features.

In addition, we wanted to inform all of our WordPress users.
I’ve noticed you have a great presence here in the WP forum. You’ve been extremely helpful! Thanks so much ??

Our vision for our Community Forum is to get users like you, to help out other users. Pretty much exactly what you’ve been doing here ??
Our Suppor Staff will be monitoring and responding as often as possible.

We’d love to chat with you Dave. Do you mind registering to the forum under the same name? I’ll send you a PM.

Thanks!

I’ve set up my Community account, but I need the secret to allow me to respond to a user post. In a n umber of areas, I get the ‘not authorized access’ message.

This should now be resolved. Thanks for informing us.

You might also want to create a method to mark a post closed. It there is such I thing, it’s not obvious (to me).

Any attempt to improve support for All-in-One Event Calendar Plugin, from Timely is to be applauded.

Having used WordPress since almost day one I have set up well over 100 WordPress sites and used many plugins and themes.

All-in-One Event Calendar Plugin has caused me more problems than any other WordPress plugin I have used. I use both free and Pro versions, both have broken my websites, mostly during upgrades.

I have found official support of the free version by Timely to be almost nonexistant, a common reply is to upgrade to the Pro version, which I did, and now regret.

Pro version support is not much better, the support system crashes and tickets are not answered with much useful information. Hopefully the crashing issues will be resolved by the new support system.

A recent ticket was answered with a common Timely support reply. It’s your theme, your plugin. That ticket reply also asked for the url of the website with the problem, despite that being included in the original ticket. If the support person had looked at the site they would have seen it was using the default WordPress theme twenty twelve and had no plugins running.

Another response blamed my server, when after an update the already slow site, 5-6 second home page load, went up to 60 seconds, despite ‘normal’ WordPress home page load times being 1 – 2 seconds on the same server. Timely did fix the issue and said I was the only client with the problem, they then posted the code for others to use and included it with updates!

On a positive note, recent updates have not killed my websites, but sites with the Pro version of the plugin still have unresolved issues, which Timely do not seen interested or able to resolve. The free version seems more stable and works better for me, at present.

Anyone recommending a better plugin? It sounds like there are serious enough problems to stay away from this one, even though some of the displays are really beautiful.

That fact that pro support is allegedly nearly as poor as the free support (I’ve experienced the latter myself) is really not acceptable.

I really hope these guys can get their collective acts together; they have created a really beautiful plugin, but it actually needs to work.

Randy,

Let me preface my comments by saying that I do not work or have anything to do with Timely other than as a user of their ai1ec.

I have not found ANY ‘serious’ problems with this plugin. Understand that the definition of ‘serious’ lies in the mind of the person using that term. Issues that I have had was the fault (if I can use that word) of my theme and it was resolved with the help of my theme developers. I’ve not had a problem that was caused by the ai1ec plugin itself. If you want a feature that the plugin does not offer, you can call that ‘serious’ if you want; I do not.

There are probably features that I would like to have, but that is my wishlist, and if enough people indicate that they would like that feature, I’m almost certain that the developers will consider it. I have to say that the development cycle can be pretty long, so your ‘gotta’ have it’ feature might not show up for six months or longer, if it shows up at all.

I believe that they do offer customization on a fee basis, which, to me makes sense. I never cease to be amazed by users who use the free version and do not want to pay for customization or the Pro version, yet they complain to all who listen about ‘how terrible’ this plugin is. Try getting a free version of anything from Microsoft. If you come up with a fix for an issue, you can send it to Timely and they will make it available to all of us.

Randy, I’m not dumping you, I just think that we, as a user community, should be more appreciative of what Timely has given us, while remembering that no software product will do everything a user wants. Of course a user can develop his/her own plugin that will do everything that person wants.

Dave,

Thanks for your considered comments. I took the earlier comment from malkieh to imply a somewhat-not-ready-for-primetime thing. Clearly, this may not the case, so I won’t go scurrying away just yet.

I think what’s lacking, as it is with all things like this, is some level of communication. When there are problems and people do not receive some acknowledgement, they assume nothing’s happening. For me, it is a failing shortcode. That, coupled with lots of unaddressed unfavorable comments and, well, you can see where my mind goes.

I got your closing paragraph – I agree with you that we all need to be more appreciative of what’s out there for free or little cost.

Randy,

I agree with your comment that there needs to better and faster communications between users and the folks at Timely. It’s just human nature to assume the worst when you don’t hear back from a ‘call for help’.

Regarding “there needs to better and faster communications between users and the folks at Timely” I have an unanswered Pro support ticket with Timely support, which has been outstanding for about three weeks.

I also note that this support forum states “63 people say it’s broken. 26 people say it works” and that a very low number of support threads in the last two months have been resolved. These are not stats that inspire confidence.

Looking through a lot of support threads on this forum, as I have the last few months it is clear that many websites, maybe hundreds have been damaged by All-in-One Event Calendar Plugin and many sites have gone offline after installing this plugin.

The concept of this plugin is very good, it looks good when working, but support is very poor, even if you pay in my experience, and although each new version fixes problems it includes new one’s.

Thanks so much Randy, Dave and Malkieh for bringing up this subject. I can’t tell you enough how much we appreciate the feedback we get from users. My name’s Bailly and I’m a plugin author and support manager here at Timely. I’ve been with the company for the past year and have seen a lot of changes in that time. Yes, our communication with users has needed improvement at times but I’m happy to say we’ve incorporated a number of measures over the last few months that have helped:

? Firstly, our team has expanded and we have more people dedicated to support.
? We’ve introduced a community forum (in lieu of the Q&A section) where users can assist each other.
? Our support staff also help out once they are finished responding to all Pro tickets.
? We switched support desk providers that offered less bugs in their API integration. Within the last month since the switch, we have not had any issues with my.time.ly going down or crashing. We are all very happy that we can once again offer reliable support to our paying customers.
? We’ve started posting important notices and updates on our Twitter and Facebook accounts. Please check them out when you have a chance.

We are learning from all your feedback and, again, we thank you for continuing to communicate with us. Malkieh – I’ve looked back through our records and I don’t seem to have a ticket from you. I recommend logging into my.time.ly and submitting another one. I will personally respond and help you resolve the issues that you’re experiencing. It may not have been sent in due to a previous crash with our earlier support desk provider. We sincerely apologize for this. If you are not a Pro customer, I recommend checking out community.time.ly and posting there since our support agents are no longer monitoring forums here in WordPress.

Our calendar depends on feedback like this to keep getting better and so we’d like to thank you again for your support as we continue to grow.

3 of the 5 FAQ links on this page are broken, they should be going to support.time.ly but they go to staging.time.ly and show the pages as broken: https://support.time.ly/faq-page/